NFL 100: At No. 96, Mike Ditka 'put the fear of God' in NFL defenses (2024)

Welcome tothe NFL 100,The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. You can order the book versionhere. Every day until the season begins, we’ll unveil new members of the list, with the No. 1 player to be crowned on Wednesday, Sept. 8.

It was 22 years before the celebrated 1985 season when Mike Ditka first helped make the Bears the best team in the NFL.

On Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, the nation mourned. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated two days earlier, and his body had not yet been laid to rest. The NFL played on, though, and the Bears had to take on the Steelers before a sparse and somber gathering at Forbes Field.

It was Ditka’s first time playing in front of his hometown fans. First place in the NFL West belonged to the Bears with a 9-1 record, but the Packers were a half-game behind them.

The Bears trailed 17-14 with five minutes left in the game and faced a second-and-36. Quarterback Bill Wade told Ditka to run a corner route, but Ditka asked to run a short hook instead because he was exhausted after catching six prior passes.

“The stress of everything in the game, the fact that it was my first time playing back in Pittsburgh, what the game meant, a lot of things were involved,” Ditka wrote in “Ditka: An Autobiography.” “My parents and a lot of relatives were there who had never seen me play. The night before the game everybody had to be at the hotel. I had to meet everybody and say hello to everybody. It gets to be more than it should be. I was probably a little hyper.”

Wade threw him a short pass. Steelers linebacker John Reger dove at Ditka and missed. Then Myron Pottios, Glenn Glass and Clendon Thomas hit him at once, and only Ditka kept running. He made it another 30 yards, where Thomas caught up with him. Then Ditka dragged him another 5 yards to the 15-yard line, where he finally went down. At the end of the 63-yard gain, Ditka lay on the field for several seconds face up and spread eagle.

“Greatest run I ever saw,” Bears running back Rick Casares said.

Roger Leclerc’s field goal three plays later tied the score, and the game ended 17-17. If not for Ditka’s run, the Bears would likely have lost and finished the regular season a half-game behind the Packers in the standings — and out of the playoffs.

A little more than one month later, Ditka and the Bears beat the Giants 14-10 to win the NFL championship.

Most of the NFL saw Ditka as an intriguing linebacker prospect when he played at Pitt. As a linebacker, tight end and punter, he had caught just 11 passes as a senior.

The Bears selected him with the fifth pick of the 1961 draft, and George Halas told him of his plans to make him a tight end — but not the kind of tight end anyone had ever seen before. Tight ends before Ditka blocked on nine of 10 plays, give or take. The vision that assistant coach Luke Johnsos had was for Ditka to be a pass-catcher.

“Nobody knew what the hell a tight end was,” Ditka said. “Halas and Luke Johnsos were designing a lot of plays for me. They had a great concept. In those days, you were covered by a linebacker or safety, and they weren’t cover guys. You could beat them.”

In Ditka’s first NFL season, he caught 56 passes for 1,076 yards – an average of 19.2 yards per catch. He also had 12 touchdown catches, tied for second most in the NFL.

He was different in many ways, and it was evident from his first game when Ditka had a problem with the effort level of his teammate Ted Karras. “Move your fat ass,” Ditka said to the guard, according to the Gary Post-Tribune. It eventually led to a sideline brawl.

As for opponents, Ditka was even less respectful. After Packers middle linebacker Ray Nitschke knocked Ditka unconscious in a preseason game, Ditka vowed revenge. Ditka’s blindside block in a subsequent regular-season game sent Nitschke to the locker room. “It didn’t bother me one bit that he got hurt,” Ditka said.

Bears defensive end Ed O’Bradovich said Ditka “put the fear of God” in linebackers and defensive backs. And even some fans. When one spectator, who apparently had been trying to quench an insatiable thirst, ran onto the field at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1966, Ditka threw a right cross that put him on his back.

“He was the meanest, toughest rascal in the league, and I’ve got the dent in my head to prove it,” Steelers safety Clendon Thomas told the Pittsburgh Press. “Anytime you came near Ditka, you had to expect forearms and fists. You came away bruised. He was mean, but he was also as talented as anyone I ever lined up against.”

In “Ditka: Monster of the Midway,” Bears center Mike Pyle called him “the most intense, motivated football player I had ever seen.” Casares said you had to kill him to get him down.

“He was one of the first offensive intimidators,” Bears receiver Johnny Morris said. “He would go after people like Ray Nitschke. He was the aggressor. There were so many times I’d see him throw a block, then immediately roll over and go for a second block. Most players, even great ones, are satisfied after they do their job. Not him. He was never satisfied.”

Ditka played the way he did because he loved the game. He loved it because it gave him an identity and fame and a living, sure. But he loved it because he found every aspect of it exhilarating — the anticipation and angst, the conflict and collisions, the speed and strategy, the pain and precision, the jolts and jubilation. He once said he played every game like it was his last, a statement no one who ever saw him put his hand in the dirt would take issue with.

“Those 60 minutes when I played, those were special,” Ditka said, his eyes still glinting decades later. “I enjoyed the heck out of that. Wrigley Field, I enjoyed the mud, the slop, people throwing beer on us when we lost going into the locker room. It was all good stuff. You turn around, give them a piece of your mind.”

At his finest, he was as punishing a two-way tight end that ever lived. He once scored four touchdowns in a game against the Rams in 1963. He caught 13 passes in another, versus Washington one season later. He dislocated his shoulder and wore a harness during the 1964 season, but he still caught 75 passes — more than any other player in the league besides his teammate Johnny Morris.

His career did not follow the typical arc, though. His most productive season statistically was his first. In 1965, at the age of 26, Ditka started to decline. He cracked his arch in a scrimmage but refused to miss any time. That led to altering his gait, which led to hamstring, knee and hip issues.

Ditka was at his best when he believed he had something to prove. When he had been to a mountaintop or two …

In the mid-60s, Ditka enjoyed his success a little too much, questioned authority and flirted with the AFL’s Houston Oilers. He subsequently fell out of favor with Halas, who traded him to the Eagles in 1967 for quarterback Jack Concannon.

His two years in Philadelphia were the worst of his career. “If there’s such a thing as purgatory on earth, I was there,” Ditka wrote in his autobiography. Ditka clashed with coach and general manager Joe Kuharich, continued to have injury issues and admittedly lost his way. He wrote, “I was about trying to kill myself with the drinking.”

Ditka thought he might be finished after the 1968 season when he received a call from Tom Landry. The Cowboys were trading for him and giving him one more chance.

“I was told I’d be a backup, and that hurt,” Ditka said. “And that’s what I was because I didn’t do all I could that first year. But the next year, I started. I worked harder than anyone else in the offseason. Nobody ever worked harder. I ran in my bare feet to toughen my bad foot … I could have done anything a 21-year-old kid could do, and I was 30. I dropped my weight 21 pounds until everything was muscle.”

Ditka put his career and life back on track in Dallas with Landry’s guidance. He was blocking more and catching less, but that was OK because he could block like a third offensive tackle. In his book “Pro Football’s 100 Greatest Players,” Hall of Fame coach George Allen said Ditka “seldom missed” as a blocker. He also wrote, “He modeled the tight end position, really, and it hasn’t changed much. You just couldn’t do much more with it than Ditka did.”

The 1971 Cowboys were a team of stars — Roger Staubach threw passes to Bob Hayes and Lance Alworth and was protected by Rayfield Wright and Forrest Gregg. Their Doomsday Defense was led by Herb Adderley, Cliff Harris, Bob Lilly and Mel Renfro. But as the Cowboys came down the stretch of the 1971 season, it was Ditka who was at the forefront of their charge.

“He was our spiritual leader,” Cowboys linebacker Lee Roy Jordan said. “He got across the urgency of competing on every play, how every play was critical.” The final touchdown of Super Bowl VI was a 7-yard pass from Staubach to Ditka on a crossing route and put away a 24-3 Cowboys’ victory.

Ditka was a critical component of championship teams early in his career and late, and he did it in two completely different ways. Like much of America, Ditka evolved from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. He went from being an open-field menace with a crew cut and single-bar facemask to a gritty role player with long hair, thick sideburns that extended past his ear lobes and a bushy mustache. What didn’t change was his ability to set the tone, which in some ways was as significant as his catching and blocking.

Ditka learned bluntness from Halas, and then he learned calm from Landry, both of which were useful when Halas hired him to coach the Bears in 1982. Because of the way he coached, the success he had and what he stood for, Ditka the coach is celebrated more than Ditka the player.

But he shouldn’t be.

Richie Petitbon played in the NFL for 14 years, including six as Ditka’s teammate in Chicago, and coached for another 16. “The best player I’ve ever been around,” he said, “was Mike Ditka.”

(Illustration: Wes McCabe /The Athletic; photo: David Durochik / Associated Press)